Mighty Gadget Blog: The latest technology news & reviews in the UK

Scan's Great White, as shown to the left, has won the coveted Custom PC Dream PC 2008 award, beating competition from HP and Armari. Armari's machine technically wasn't fully entered, as the magazine chose not to fully review it since the submitted computer was a prototype not available for mass production.

Custom PC has had a Dream PC competition dating back to 2004. Previous winners include SavRow in 2004 (for a water-cooled machine featuring a single core Athlon64 and GeForce 6800 Ultra, a spec that cost several thousand pounds at the time and would be outgunned by a £500 laptop today), Armari in 2005 and Vadim in 2006. Scan's back-to-back wins in 2007 and 2008 make the firm the first supplier to win twice.

Scan's beast is based around the following spec:

• Silverstone TJ07 super tower case, finished with extensive chrome plating and laser-etched Great White logo. Various sections of the case are lit with white LEDs to give it a slightly more upmarket feel.
• nVidia 790i SLI motherboard
• 1kW Corsair PSU
• 3 1TB Samsung Spinpoint F1
• Extensive, custom-manufactured water cooling equipment from Aqua Computer and Alphacool
• Core 2 Quad Q9650 - overclocked to 4.4GHz from its stock 3GHz speed
• 2x2Gb Corsair Dominator DDR3
• 3 XTX GTX 280 graphics cards with 1Gb of GDDR3 RAM each, GPU clocked at 670MHz and RAM at 2500MHz
• 64Gb OCZ SSD - 2.5" device with 143MB/sec read and 93MB/sec write
• Panasonic slot-loading DVD writer
• Panasonic slot-loading Blu Ray writer as well
• X-Fi Titanium Fatal1ty sound card
• KillerNIC M1 network interface card with 400Mhz processor
• Vista Ultimate 64bit
• 24" Zalman 3D monitor

How does it perform? In a word, fast. Custom PC unfortunately don't provide extensive benchmark results but they claim to have seen it perform their standard video encoding benchmark to within a couple of points of an overclocked Skulltrail rig.

Price? That's the tricky part. If you want the best, you can't compromise - and that means paying Scan a total of £11,162.49 inc VAT. Reckon you could build better for less? What would you change? Leave your comments and let us know.

Well we have all heard of the Asus Eee PC but now Asus are hoping to do to the desktop market what they did to the notebook market.

As you can see from the picture the Asus Eee Box is an ultra small desktop PC and is expected to cost $349 in the US or around £200 - £220 here in the UK.

The Eee Box is also the smallest fully functioning PC on the market coming with either Windows XP or Linux.

It is expected to be released on 21 September 2008 in the UK or August 11 in the US.

So what do you get for £220? Well the specification of the system is as follows:

Hardware / Ports / Accessories

• Intel Atom N270 (1.6 GHz, FSB 533)
• 1024MB DDR2 667 Memory
• 80 GB Hard Disk
• On-board Intel GMA 950
• 10/100/1000 Mbps LAN, 802.11n WLAN
• Azalia ALC888 Audio Chip
• USB x 2
• Card Reader x 1
• Headphone-out jack (WO/SPDIF) x 1
• MIC x 1
• USB 2.0 x 2
• Gigabit LAN x 1
• DVI out x 1
• Line-Out (L/R) with S/PDIF x 1
• WiFi antenna
• 19Vdc, 4.74A, 65W power adaptor
• Mouse
• Keyboard
• VESA mount
• WiFi antenna
• Stand

Software

• Either Windows XP Home Edition or Linux
• StarOffice or MS Works

The guys over at  Hot Hardware have had chance to review the new Eee Box. Apparently the system is the smallest full function PC they have seen to date. It also has some room for overclocking and Hot Hardware managed to increase the processor from 1.6Ghz to 1.75Ghz while maintaining stability.

The Atom processor runs at an astonishingly low 2.5 watts and actually managed to keep up with AMDs 35 watt Turion 64 ML-37. The CPU outperformed the AMD Sempron 2800+ (1.6GHz), the Pentium 4 at 2GHz and the Athlon XP 1600+ (1.4GHz)

In terms of the multimedia capabilities the Eee Box managed to handle a 720p WMV clip quite comfortably with around 35 - 50% of the CPU being utilised. It unfortunately did not perform quite so well with full 1080p and the reviewer found it choppy and the video stopped in certain places.

The Eee Box managed to impress with its low overall power consumption. At peak it only used 22.3 Watts!!

Overall the general opinion of the Asus Eee Box was excellent. It is a bargain price, miniscule in size and performs well.

Personally I would skip XP on a system like this and stick with Linux. I am thinking it would make a nice little server for my test sites and also to handle my downloads.

Read the full review of the Asus Eee Box at Hot Hardware